8 Not-So-Evident Reasons Why Apps Get Rejected By Apple

What can be worse than reaching the golden hour of submitting your long-awaited iOS app to the App Store and receiving a rejection letter afterwards? Not only morally – an app rejection is a huge loss of time. It can take up to about two or three weeks while your app is under Apple’s quality control. And if it gets rejected, you receive the response and have either to appeal to Apple Review Board or to make corrections (which takes time) and resubmit the app anyway (which takes more time).

Then it is under the same review process. If everything is well for the second time, the app gets approved and placed on the App Store. But what a loss of time can it be. Such a situation can be completely at odds with your marketing/business plans.

We all know that Apple quality control generally dismisses badly made, crashing, bug-filled apps, apps with nudity and violence in content. But there are several much less evident reasons that caused rejections. You can find some subtleties you don’t know even within a reason that’s generally apparent. Let’s take a look at them.

1. Copycatting Apple Apps And Misusing Trademarks

Apple generally dislikes copycatting and misspelling, especially when it comes to their own products and services. You can’t have an iPhone image inside your iPhone app. Apple rejects such misspellings as ”iPhone” or ”iTunz”, placed in names of third-party apps. They reject apps which are ”confusingly similar” to existing Apple apps, be it owing to functionality or mimicked user interface. Worth adding that they never allow referencing to rival platforms.

2. Satiety Of Ads

Apple will question the value and reject your app if it’s designed predominantly for displaying ads, and if it artificially increases the number of impressions or click-throughs of ads. Empty iAd banners aren’t welcome as well.

3. Messing Up With Standard Switches

You can’t alter the functions of standard switches (namely Volume Up/Down and Ring/Silent). Not that this idea would be popular, but the fact is quite interesting.

4. Issues With Device Compatibility

Apps for iPhone must run without modification on iPad and different resolutions of iPhones. The iPhone 6 is probable to get the doubled resolution (1280?2272), so it will take some time to readjust apps. But luckily Apple always tries to make such transitions painless for developers. So if you are building an app just for the resolution of the iPhone 5S, make sure it’s compatible with the iPad and the shorter iPhone 4S – not specifically redesigned for them, of course.

5. Misplacement Of Pricing

Keep your descriptions and images clear. Not only from mentioning rival mobile platforms – but as well from pricing amounts. It’s prohibited by Apple; and the price you’ll set in your text description in one currency will be completely irrelevant for your users from other countries.

6. Misused In-App Purchases

Apple is very strict with the mechanism of In-App Purchases. You can’t set your app for unlocking additional features and content with other mechanisms than the App Store. You can’t sell digital content and features in other way than IAP – for example, external links to websites for that purpose are not allowed. Vice versa, you cannot sell physical goods and services through In-App Purchases. And no one can use them to ‘purchase’ access to built-in iOS capabilities – there’s a separate guideline about that.

Worth nothing that Apple rejects apps that use IAP to sell expiring credits or other currencies; and all such credits must be consumed within the app.

6. Defaming Famous People

Apple will reject apps and games that ‘defame’ famous people: simply put. Thus making a ‘political’ app can end up in a rejection letter. Decision on the exact level of allowed ‘mocking’ and ‘caricaturing’ is up to Apple.

7. Excessive Violence And Discrimination

Apple rejects any apps depicting excessive and realistic violence, Russian roulette, abuse of children in a heartbeat, especially if they consider them encouraging violence. What’s more, they do not allow in-game ‘enemies’ to be solely of a specific race, culture, government, or other real entities, which can be far less evident. Apple bans any signs of discourtesy regarding religion, culture, and ethnicity.

8. Risks Of Damages Or Injuries

As for harm, Apple rejects apps if their usage can cause physical harm to a person or damage to the Apple device. As for devices, Apple bans apps that drain the battery in a whisper, and cause the device to generate excessive heat.

Luckily, Apple has rather brief and to-the-point guidelines about things they can reject for. Unluckily, Apple rejects the apps they ”believe are over the line”, and they drawn their own lines. But the safety of this issue is in the hands of your development team, who are most likely to take care of deploying your application on the Store. The same team who will warn you beforehand of possible complications, so you can prevent the trouble and launch your app on time.